Company registered under the Hongkong Ordinance of 1865 is absolutely subject to the creation of the Hongkong Legislature.
On registration, the members of the Company - previously a number of individual persons - become, for the purposes of the memorandum and articles of association, a corporate body with perpetual succession.
It is required to have a registered office within the Colony and therefore it must have within the jurisdiction of the Courts some legally recognised servants and property.
Surely the Hongkong Legislature can lay down conditions it pleases. It can enforce them by action within the Colony, perhaps - though the Privy Council judgement in Ashburton for Canada & Gilhula shows some tendency to relax the absolute strictness of the rule against extraterritorial action - but it does lay down what must be done by the Company within or without the Colony to obtain recognition of the Hongkong Court's corporate body.
Just as it can document what is to be done within the territory, so too transactions to be done and finished outside this territory are to be authenticated abroad before they will be recognised in the Hongkong Courts.
See letter from F.O. for observations, dated 10.3, from Cox, para. 17/3.
I still doubt. The point on which we wires 52 was not put in detail to the BoT, and it would appear from these documents on stamp duty, Sec 4(8) that they do not appreciate the difference between the products of the Imperial Parliament and those of the local legislature, and that they have not considered whether it is competent for the latter to pass such an Enactment as Order 8b of 1907.
It is of course within the competence of the legislature to pass an Act in the shape of the Act of 1883.
I think that this question should be elaborated in sending the order to the F.O.
JJR. 18/3.
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